Guardians + film festivals + more

New reviews and concurrent film fests in Chicago: nonfiction and critics choices and creatures and Romanians and British Pakistanis in a romcom.

James Gunn’s third-and-a-half outing with these characters and performers is largely a joyous sweetheart of a movie; even better is that it plays like a film that can stand on its own, not a nubbin-worn Marvel serial. What’s it about? Raccoons and kindness. And gleefully bad gags.

Gunn’s sheer competence soars alongside his customary monumental goofiness. The writer-director fires off a generous flotilla of 1970s midnight movie-style salvos more than innocuous Marvel green-screen renderings.

Guardians Of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is busy with all sorts of stuff, but it doesn’t feel, for instance, like Taika Waititi’s haphazard aspartame bunkum. And familiarity breeds calculus: the filmmakers know, for the most part, how to use the goodwill earned by the actors in the past near-decade, even the now-massive grown Groot. More here.

Hopeful, earnest words from the programmers and producers of two concurrent Chicago film festivals, Doc10 and the Chicago Critics Film Festival here.

Says Anthony Kaufman, senior programmer of Doc10:

I think a lot of the filmmaking community, and in particular, nonfiction filmmakers, are worried about the changes happening in distribution and exhibition. Distributors are acquiring fewer films, and documentaries, in particular, are being released in much fewer theaters. But I say two things in response to that. Because of the crisis in acquisitions and distribution, it makes a festival opportunity like Doc10 even more essential—it’s probably the only way to see many of these movies in a theatrical setting, if at all, with great visuals and sound, and the immersive experience they deserve, and bring the community together in a way that is empowering and fun. Plus, when it comes to documentary filmmakers, they’ve never exactly been motivated or dictated by commercial interests, so great documentaries will continue to get made, and documentary filmmakers will continue to persist, aided by grants and the nonprofit world. Just because Netflix and Amazon are less interested now in this year’s Sundance-winning doc about Nikki Giovanni doesn’t really change what Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster are doing or how they’ve been working for the last two decades.

Also opening: Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. and Shekar Kapur’s What’s Love Got To Do With It.